Ruling Puts Tyrants On Notice

LONDON — Some dictators and former dictators around the world might be sleeping less easily since Britain's Law Lords ruled that Chile's Gen. Augusto Pinochet could not claim immunity for serious human-rights violations committed under his regime.

At the least, tyrants such as Idi Amin, Uganda's former president now living in Saudi Arabia, will know they cannot travel abroad without risking arrest and a long prison term.

Several experts on international law who have studied the ruling, announced Wednesday, hailed it as a legal landmark whose full implications still have to be worked out.

Nonetheless they said it is step toward establishing legal principles.

In the case of Pinochet, British Home Secretary Jack Straw is faced with a decision whether to accede to a Spanish judge's extradition request or to allow the former dictator to return home on compassionate grounds because of his age, 83, and poor state of health.

Straw had been given a Dec. 2 deadline to decide, but Thursday a magistrate's court granted his request for an additional week.

The Law Lords' decision applied to former heads of state but not serving heads. The lords said there were certain crimes, such as murder, torture and hostage-taking, that were so terrible no one could be immune from prosecution.

In addition to Amin, whose regime in the 1970s left hundreds of thousands of people dead, some former heads of state who might have been made uncomfortable by the ruling are Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier of Haiti, who is in exile in France, and Indonesia's Suharto, whose role in a 1965 coup and later takeover of East Timor could subject him to charges.

Michael Byers, a professor of international law at Oxford University, said the Law Lords' ruling "symbolizes the fact that one of the more influential supreme courts of the world is now ready to apply and enforce law in a way that international lawyers have known they were capable of doing for the last 20 or 25 years. They haven't made law. They have just decided to exercise their powers.

"It hadn't happened before because people like Pinochet don't appear all that often abroad. It is often difficult to prepare a case if they go abroad for a three- or four-day visit. He was here long enough to enable us to marshal our arguments."

Some lawyers have suggested that one effect of the ruling might be to make dictators think twice about relinquishing power, as Pinochet did, because they would be vulnerable to prosecution once they were out of office.

Byers and other experts rejected that argument.

"In the vast majority of cases, former heads of state are removed against their will," Byers said. "You'll never have a legal situation that fits the ideal policy in every situation. After this ruling, any dictator has even more reason to think twice about his conduct in office. It's that deterrent factor which is most important."

Michael Posner, executive director of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights in New York, said that although the Law Lords' ruling exempted serving heads of state, it is likely they will be held responsible for their crimes as international law develops, so the question of their facing prosecution only after leaving office will not then arise, he said.

Richard Wilson, professor of international law at American University's Washington College of Law, said, "I'm not one who'd think we need to be reluctant to undertake accountability because of fears of perpetual dictatorships."

He said the ruling "essentially makes former dictators prisoners of their countries." All too often they have been given protection as a condition of transition to democracy, as happened in Pinochet's case, he said.

"It is a very, very high price to pay for people who have been victimized," he said.

Pinochet's lawyers argued before the Law Lords that if he were held accountable for crimes committed under his regime, then theoretically former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher could be extradited for ordering the sinking of an Argentine battleship during the Falklands War or former President George Bush could face charges arising from the 1991 Persian Gulf war.

Legal experts discounted that argument.

"I think this ruling really should send chills down the repressors' backs rather than those of world leaders who take justifiable action in the context of wars or protection of international security," Wilson said.

Posner commented: "The ruling opens the question of how we go forward, what are the rules of the road. You have to look at the circumstances, the individual and the allegations. The ruling opens the possibility of future efforts to extradite other heads of state, but in my view these would not be successful in the prosecution of a Thatcher or a Bush.